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EULOGY 



ON 



DANIEL WEBSTER, 



DELIVERED BY REQUEST 
OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT AND CITIZENS OF PORTLAND, 

il^frtektj, tm> 17, 1852: ~^'~ 

BY LEONARD WOODS, JR., D. D., 

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE. 




BRUNSWICK: 
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY J. GRIFFIN, 

1852. 



H -34-0 



CITY OF PORTLAND : 

Mayor's Office, Nov. 19th, 1852. 
Sir, — It affords me great pleasure to transmit a copy of a Resolu- 
tion unanimously passed by our City Council on the iStli inst., re- 
questing a copy for publication of your very interesting and able Ad- 
dress on the character of Mr. Webster, delivered in this City on the 
17th inst., in which request I most cordially unite. 

With entire respect, 

Albion K. Farris. 
Rev. Leonard Woods, D. D. 

President of Bowdoin College. 



In Board of Aldermen, Nov. 18, 1852. 

Resolved, — That the thanks of the City Government be presented 
10 Dr. Leonard Woods, for his very able and beautiful analysis of 
the public, private, moral and intellectual character of the lamented 
Daniel Webster ; and that he be requested to furnish a copy of 
the same for publication. 

RES0LVED,--That the Mayor be requested to transmit a copy of 
these resolutions to Dr. Woons. 

In Board of Aldermen, Nov. 18, 1852. 
Read and passed in concurrence by unanimous vote. 

Attest : Wm. Boyd, City Clerk. 



City of Portland, Nov. 18, 1852. 

At a meeting of the Webster Committee the following resolution 
was oflered by John A. Poor, Esq. and unanimously adopted. 

Resolved, — That the thanks of the Committee be tendered to the 
Rev. Dr. Woods for the very learned, eloquent and appropriate Eu- 
logy by him pronounced upon the Hon. Daniel Webster at the re- 
quest of the City authorities and Citizens of Portland, on the 17th inst., 
and that a copy thereof be requested for publication. 

Jltttst: C. D. Bearce, Secretary. 

James Furbish, Chairman. 



To Hon. Albion K. Parris, Mayor, and 
James Furbish, Esq., Chairman. 

As my Eulogy on Daniel Webster was delivered by appointment 
of the City Government and a Committee of the Citizens, I do not feel 
at liberty to decline their request to have it published. It is accord- 
ingly herewith submitted to their disposal. 

With many thanks for the kind terms in which their request is 
expressed and communicated, 

I remain, gentlemen, with high respect, yours etc. 

Leo.nard Woods. 
Brunswick, Nov. 20, 1852. 



We have assembled together to take our part 
in giving expression to a great national sorrow. 
In the extent to which it has prevailed, and in the 
depth to which it has penetrated, there has been 
now, for a long time, no sorrow like to this. The 
feelings which have turned our steps aside from 
the paths of business, and brought them hither, in 
mournful procession, to the House of God, are not 
confined to our own breasts, but are shared by 
millions of our countrymen. The solemn scene 
which here presents itself to our view, is only 
one of a thousand witnessed in every part of the 
country. The whole Republic has clothed itself 
in sackcloth, and abandoned itself to grief The 
whole tone of the public mind, usually so cheerful 
and jubilant, is suddenly depressed to the lowest 
mood and measure of sadness. A subdued and 



thoughtful air reigns in the busy streets, a 
solemn stillness broods over the home and the 
fireside, the tear starts unbidden in eyes unused 
to weep. Turn which way we may, mournful 
symbols, in gloomy profusion, annomice mutely, 
but with affecting significance, the presence of a 
sorrow, deep as the fountains of the heart, and 
co-extensive with the utmost boundaries of the 
nation. 

It is not that we have been visited with any 
great material calamity. The flock has not been 
cut off" from the fold, nor the herd from the stall. 
The staff" of bread has not failed. The land has 
not been desolated by pestilence or war. These 
harsher judgments of Heaven, affecting simply 
our material mterests, may awaken the sorrow of 
selfish regret, but could never produce a sorrow 
of so refined and generous a quality,, as that which 
now oppresses the heart, and darkens the face, of 
the whole people. 

When a few weeks since, the tidings, Daniel 
Webster IS no more, were inscribed, as it were, 
on a scroll m the Heavens, and displayed at once 
over the whole continent, the first emotions which 
broke forth were those of natural sympathy. 
There was much in the dignified composure of the 



dying scene of the great Statesman, in its Christian 
resignation, in its domestic tenderness, in its entire 
fitness for a close to the grand epic of his Hfe, 
which was adapted to move the deepest sensibilities 
of that vast cloud of witnesses by whom it was, 
as it were, smTOunded and beheld. And while the 
nearer circle of kindred and friends, of neidibors 
and domestics, stood weeping around the Dead, 
the whole nation lifted up its voice, and wept 
with those that wept. 

But hardly had this first gush of natural sym- 
pathy subsided, before the people began to recall, 
each one for himself, the great quahties and great 
services of the Deceased ; to reflect on the vast 
circle of interests upon which liis agency had been 
so beneficially exerted, and on the dangerous crises 
through which they had passed safely by his inter- 
position ; to consider how he had identified hmi- 
self with all the great institutions and interests of 
his country ; in short, to revolve the whole story of 
his remarkable career, from its humble beginnings 
at the outermost verge of civihzation, till it reached 
the proudest eminence in the civihzed world : and 
as they did this, there began to prevail a sense of 
almost personal bereavement, a feelmg of the in- 
calculable magnitude of the loss sustained by the 



8 

nation in the death of this great man. And as 
they had wept before in generous sympathy with 
others, they began now to weep for themselves 
and for their children, — sorrowing most of all that 
they should see his face no more. 

Mingled with these feelings, there has also ap- 
peared some reverent recognition of the high 
sovereignty of Him, who thus, by a single blow, has 
laid prostrate the pride and hope of the nation ; 
and some penitent acknowledgment of his awful 
justice in this visitation. The God of our Fathers, 
so often forgotten in the day of prosperity, has 
been remembered in this hour of adversity. 

And in the train of these impressions, there 
has also sprung up some juster and deeper sense 
of the instability of earthly fortmie, of the vanity 
of human greatness and glory, of the worthless- 
ness of the objects after which, as a nation, we 
have been running so madly. When in an instance 
so signal it has been seen, that man in his best 
estate is altogether vanity, and that all the glory 
of man is as the flower of the grass, the exclama- 
tion has been extorted from a thousand lips, 
"What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue !" 

The nation would thus seem to have been 
brought by this great judgment to a solemn pause, 



9 

and to have had stirred within its breast, in which 
the fires of discord and the lusts of power and 
aggrandizement were so recently raging, some 
kindlier feelings, some better thoughts, some loftier 
and purer and holier purposes ; to have been 
waked up for a season to a higher consciousness 
of its duty and its destiny. 

Let us trust that this season will not prove to 
have been only a lucid interval in a career of 
madness. Let us trust that these salutary impres- 
sions will not flide away from our minds, when 
these pageants of mourning shall have vanished 
from our sight ; but that they will long continue 
to exert upon us a restraining, a refining, and an 
ennobling influence ; and that thus this dispensa- 
tion of Providence, now invested with the dread 
aspect of a divine judgment, being laid to heart 
and wisely improved, will become a richer blessing 
than if our corn and our wine were increased, than 
if our armies were crowned with new victories, or 
new territories were added to our domain. 

In his Address on the completion of the 
Bmiker Hill Monument, Mr. Webster paused, and 
pointing to the column wliich rose before him, 
exclauned, " It is not from my lips that that strain 

2 



10 

of eloquence is this day to flow, most competent 
to move and excite the vast multitudes around me : 
the powerful speaker stands motionless before us 1" 
With how much more reason may it be felt by 
those appointed to pronounce his Eulogy, that it is 
not from their lips, but from his, that the eloquence 
of the occasion is to proceed ; and that the best 
thing they can do, is to point to him, and let him 
speak for himself. Let us then place ourselves 
under the spell of that great Presence, which has 
been so familiar to us in days gone by, and which 
now, once more, stands invisibly before us ! Dur- 
ing this hour sacred to his memory, let us pass 
in review before our minds the several attributes 
of that complex greatness, ' where every god did 
seem to set his seal.' And let us contemplate 
these attributes neither with an overweenmg admi- 
ration on the one hand, nor with a captious criti- 
cism and grudging approval, on the other. If in 
selecting our public servants for offices of high 
trust, we justly impose on ourselves the cold 
maxim of Principles and not men, let us relax some- 
thing of the rigor of this rule in judging of them 
when their stewardship is over ; and then at least, 
if at no other time, give some place to that loyalty 
of the heart, which passing beyond their principles. 



11 

attaches itself to whatever was lofty in their per- 
sonal character, noble and generous m their words 
and deeds. 

In surveying the elements of Mr. Webster's 
greatness, our attention is first arrested by his 
extraordinary inteUectual iwiver. This undoubted- 
ly constituted his chief distinction. Wherever he 
was known, it was principally as a commanding 
intelhgence. It was in this sovereign power of 
mind, throned in that majestic forehead, beaming 
in those cavernous and unfathomable eyes, and 
stamping the impress of thought upon his whole 
countenance, that his strength lay. Every one 
who came into any connection with him, in the 
most casual intercourse of life, in the freest intima- 
cy of friendship, felt the controlUng power of 
his mind. It was this which secured to him an 
easy superiority in that path of Hfe which he had 
marked out for himself, and which would probably 
have given him as easy a superiority in almost 
any other which he might have chosen. It was 
this which gained him an easy victory over every 
opponent with whom he ever measured his 
strength. It was this which gave him his lordly 
mastery over every subject to which he ever 
turned his attention. It was this which imparted 



12 

to his words their oracular power, to his style its 
crystal clearness, to his whole discourse its lucid 
order. It was this which gave to his common 
sense its practical wisdom, to his graver judgments 
their infallible authority ; and imj^ressed on all his 
opinions in politics and religion, a certain meas- 
ured justness and grand simplicity, in harmony 
with the substantial verities and great realities of 
existence. It was this, in fine, which transfusing 
itself through the thousand minor j^articulars of 
his public and j)rivate life, gave them an elevated 
and even majestic tone, and produced the collec- 
tive impression of greatness. 

In vindicating for Mr. Webster this transcendent 
intellectual power, it is not necessary to deny, that 
in particular mental attributes, he may have been 
deficient, either by nature or by practice, in com- 
parison with some others. It may readily be con- 
ceded that he displayed less high intuitive per- 
ception of truth than Plato, less profound philo- 
sophical insight than Coleridge, less imaginative 
vividness and richness of conception than Burke, 
less metajDhysical acumen than Edwards; and at 
the same time it may be claimed for him, that in 
native original strength of mind, in what may be 
caUed naJced intellect, he was equal to any of them. 



13 

From some latent bias, perhaps, or from outward 
circumstances, this original intellectual force took 
in him a practical rather than a speculative direc- 
tion, moved in the argumentative rather than in 
the intuitive process, the logical rather than the 
metaphysical method. But it by no means follows, 
that had the causes by which this direction of his 
mind was determined, been different, he might 
not have succeeded equally in different and oppo- 
site departments. It may generally be presumed 
of minds of that higher order to which his cer- 
tainly belonged, that they are competent to take 
the lead in any of the great departments of human 
thought and action, even in those most opposite to 
the departments in which they have earned their 
chief distinction. It has certainly been often 
seen in the histories of truly great men, that 
they have passed, back and forth, from the specu- 
lative to the practical sphere, from the cloister 
to the camp and the court, from the deepest se- 
clusion of reUgious or philosophical meditation, to 
the highest post of military command or of po- 
litical administration, and found themselves equal- 
ly at home in each, and foremost in all. In 
the lives of Cardinal Ximenes and of Chancellor 
Bacon, we have examples of men, who having 



14 

distinguished themselves in the holiest exercises 
of religion, or in the profoundest investigations 
of science and philosophy, acquired afterwards, 
when opportunity offered, a new distinction in 
the department of administrative statesmanship. 
With these examples in view, why may it not be 
beheved, that our great Statesman, had his lot in 
life been different, or had he been permitted to 
enjoy at last his long coveted leisure, and to exe- 
cute his cherished purposes, might have placed 
himself side by side with the great masters of 
speculative philosophy, or of divine wisdom! 

But whatever may be thought of this sugges- 
tion, it may be affirmed, I think, without extrava- 
gance, and judging from physical as well as other 
indications, that he was originally endowed with 
as much pure intellect as any man of the age ; 
even if we may not venture to say of him, as was 
said of King Solomon, that there was none like 
him before him, nor after him shall any arise hke 
unto him, in that wise and understanding heart 
which the Lord had given him. 

And we have come together to-day in a willing 
allegiance to this royalty of spirit. On other 
days we pay a sordid homage to wealth, to station, 
to worldly greatness. We would now render a 



15 

more reasonable service to Mind. This is that in 
which man is most nearly resembled to the Infinite 
Intelligence, and which, in projDortion to the degree 
in which it is possessed, if not perverted and abused, 
lays the foundation for all the true and legitimate 
distinctions among men. It is the mind which 
makes the man, not the accidents of birth, or for- 
tune, or station. The man of great mind is the 
true nobleman ; the man of the greatest mind is 
King among men. This crown of intellectual su- 
premacy we would gladly award to hun, from 
whom we have withholden the high magistracy 
recently in our gift. It was justly, as weU as 
beautifully remarked of him by the successful can- 
didate for that high magistracy, that " his greatness 
is of that rare character which no earthly position 
could exalt." In this his appropriate intellectual 
greatness we prefer to contemplate him. From 
the dead level of intellectual mediocrity spreading 
far around, we rejoice that we may look up to one 
Alpine summit, proudly rearing itself above the 
plain, and piercing the very skies. We feel it to 
be a matter of just pride, that in our age and 
among ourselves, a mind has appeared endowed 
with gifts so rare and so resplendent. Let others 
boast of their great men as they may, we shall 



16 

always be able to point to Daniel Webster, and 
say, a greater is here. 

But Mr. Webster is entitled to admiration as 
well for his great learning, as for his great mind. — 
He was certainly no mere scholar, and yet he was a 
man of great and various acquisitions. Beginning 
at the very bottom, he climbed to the very top of 
the Hill of Science. No youthful student ever 
had less to help and cheer him on his way, than 
the young farmer-boy of Salisbury, when he walked 
his two or three miles every day in the winter, to 
get what learning he could from an itinerant 
school-master. But he had in him, from this early 
period, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and 
something of that spirit of hterary heroism, so 
quaintly expressed by Cowley : 

Alps rise o'er Alps ; but I will conquer all, 
And march the Muses' Hannibal. 

The day for cheap literature and the diifusion 
of knowledge, had not yet come. Few books found 
their way into those outskirts of society where his 
lot was cast ; but those few were standard works 
in prose and poetry ; such as we may remember to 
have seen in the book-case of the New England 
farm-house many years ago, now alas! supplanted 



17 

by works of qiiite another sort. They were books 
worth readmo; ; and in the intervals of labor on 
the farm, and especially during the long winter 
evenings, they were, we may be sure, well read by 
young Webster, and conned over and over, and 
in good part committed to memory. As his mind 
was not pre-occupied with trifles, and had its appe- 
tite sharpened by restraint, it fed and grew apace 
upon this spare and wholesome diet, and made 
more life-blood out of a single volume, than others 
from a library. In this early training, the fire-side 
stories of the hardships and dangers of the border- 
life, in those troublous times of Indian, French, and 
English wars, had their full share ; and the stern 
features of the surromiding scenery, and the vary- 
ing aspect and moods of the adjacent mountain, 
forest and river, were not mthout their influence. 
From this elementary education of the school 
and the household, he passed to the Academy and 
College. As the privileges which these afforded 
were to be paid for out of his father's hard earnings, 
and his own labor in school-keeping, they were not 
misimproved. Even at this early period he made 
the impression of superiority, and excited the ex- 
pectation that he would one day be a great man. 
He was seen to be intent already on some great 

3 



18 

object, and to be bending all his powers to the 
attainment of it. At the close of this second 
period of his training, he arrived at the threshold 
of manhood, with his mind already well stored and 
discipHned, and with a good foundation laid to build 
upon. 

He now entered at once upon his professional 
training as a Lawyer, and devoted himself with all 
his mind and heart to the study of the Common 
Law, — still paying his o^vn way by school-keeping, 
and copying deeds in the Register's ofdce at Frye- 
burg. Li this study, the character of his mind 
was already indicated, by his never resting in cases 
and precedents, but always ascending to the sources 
of the Law, and grasping its principles. From the 
study of the Common Law he advanced successive- 
ly, according to the gradation of the Courts in 
which he practised, to the study of all the higher 
branches of Jurisprudence. And so, by sure steps 
and by his own efforts, long before he had reached 
the meridian of his life, he had come to stand, in 
respect to thorough and various legal learning, at 
the very head of the American Bar, and was 
widely known through the country as the great 
Lawyer, before he was known in any other charac- 
ter. 



19 

After reaching this eminence he was led, both 
by his owni tastes and by the call of public duty, 
from a professional to a political career. Li order 
to qualify himself in the best manner for this ca- 
reer, he entered upon a wholly new class of studies, 
comprising the science of government. Political 
Philosophy and Economy, the history of nations, 
ancient and modern, and especially the history of 
his own country. And so successfully and to such 
an extent did he pursue these, that in respect to 
all the learning of the Statesman, he was acknowl- 
edged to be without a rival. In whatever other 
respects he may have been well matched by his 
great competitors in public life, m the various 
branches of learning necessary to this high calling, 
he was accomplished beyond them all. He accord- 
ingly took, in this fourth period, the same pre-emi- 
nent rank as a Statesman, which he had before held 
as a Lawyer; or rather, as these vocations were 
thenceforward exercised by him contemporaneously 
quite to the end of his life, he stood foremost, at 
the same moment, m the Court-room and in the 
Senate-chamber ; and thus, in the strong language 
of Mr. Choate, "won for himself the double fame, 
and wore the double wreath of Murray and of 
Chatham, of Wm. Pinkney and Rufus King, in one 
blended and transcendent superiority." 



20 

Nor did Mr. Webster, amid these severer studies, 
neglect the claims or disdain the charms of general 
Literature. The extent and accuracy of his gen- 
eral knowledge, esjoecially in the departments of 
science and of classical learning, has been sometimes 
called in question. And it is undoubtedly true, 
that the range of his general knowledge may have 
been limited in comparison with that of some 
French Encyclopedist, and that his knowledge of 
Greek and Latin may have been inaccurate in com- 
parison with that of some German philologist. 
But it must still be acknowledged, that for one 
oppressed with the double cares of a Lawyer and a 
Statesman, his studies were highly liberal and 
thorough. He appears to have kept tolerably well 
up with the progress of modern science, interesting 
himself especially in those branches of it which 
related to his agricultural pursuits and his manly 
sports, and in those which tended to enlarge the 
conceptions of his mind of the wisdom and glory of 
the Creator. He is reported to have been em- 
ployed, during some of his last days, in reading the 
volumes of Humboldt's Cosmos. — He appears also to 
have maintained, through his whole life, an intimate 
and discriminating acquaintance with the best Greek 
and Latin writers. And in his recent Address be- 



21 

fore the New York Historical Society, to say noth- 
ing of his other speeches, he has certainly exhibited 
a knowledge of the ancient classics, which is nei- 
ther mean in quaUt}^, nor in quantity inconsid- 
erable. — To those at all acquainted with his writ- 
ings it hardly need be said, that he was quite at 
home in our standard English literature, and had a 
singular appreciation no less of its finer beauties of 
style and sentiment, than of its more sterling merits. 
On the whole, we shall look in vain for any among 
our public men, (if we except a few, a very few, — 
here and there an Everett or a Legare,) who give 
evidence of an equal richness and fineness of lite- 
rary culture. 

There is no character to which Mr. Webster 
ever made less pretension, than to that of a man of 
Letters. Literature was not to him a profession or 
a trade, but a recreation and a passion. It was an 
affair of the heart. And it well repaid his affec- 
tion. It drew a vein of beauty through the rough 
texture of his colossal greatness. It twined its 
graceful garlands around the pillar of his strength. 
It served him many a good turn in his public de- 
bates, as in the affair of Banquo's ghost in his Re- 
ply to Mr. Ha3nie. It occupied agreeably many a 
lonely hour, and gently smoothed many a rough 



22 

passage in his journey of life. And it came to 
liini at last in his dying hour, and relieved his mor- 
tal agony, by recalhng to him a sweet strain of 
Gray's Elegy, from the fading memories of his boy- 
ish days. 

But the greatness of Mr. Webster was owing 
hardly more to his great mind and his great learn- 
ing, than to ihe noble traits of Ids personal character, — 
those quahties of the heart, which, so far as they 
were known, have caused him to be loved, as much 
as admired. 

In his pubhc life and before the world at large, 
his bearing was cold and reserved, his presence 
^ lofty and sour'. And those who saw him only thus, 
were apt to conclude that he was, in common 
phrase, all head and no head, — that he was a very 
great man, but very unloveable. But in so judg- 
ing, they greatly misjudged him. In truth, the 
emotional part of his nature appears to have been 
as richly endowed and fully developed, as the intel- 
lectual. He was a large-hearted, genial man ; fuU 
of simple tastes and instincts, gentle and refined 
sensibilities, and warm natural affections ; liberal 
almost to prodigality ; frank in showing both his 
likes and his dislikes, and scorning every hypocriti- 



23 

cal pretension ; incapable of any thing mean ; un- 
willing to do or say anything, on his own part, to 
give unnecessary offence to any human being, and 
always ready to forgive his enemies and slander- 
ers. He had faults, no doubt ; but they were 

the faults of a generous, not a niggardly nature. 
They were not the faults of avarice, or cowar- 
dice, or treachery, or hypocrisy, or vindictiveness ; 
but rather faults of that class which spring from 
the excess of good qualities, and are sometimes 
said to lean to virtue's side. But whatever they 
were, they never brought over his conscience to 
their side, or bribed his judgment into approbation. 
His moral sense, unclouded and vmperverted, point- 
ed to the right so steadfastly, and bore witness to it 
so clearly, that he found it impossible, without be- 
traying some embarrassment, even to argue pro- 
fessionally for a cause which he knew to be bad. 

Not the least mteresting of the traits of Mr. 
Webster's personal character were his tastes for 
country-life, and its pleasant alternations of homely 
toil, of manly sport, and of sohtary meditation. In 
these natural tastes he resembled the English, 
rather than the American statesman. He once 
spoke of Mr. Calhoun with some wonder, as having 
no recreations, and seeming to feel no need of 



24 

reliefs from business and retirement from the world. 
To himself, on the contrary, some seasons of re- 
prieve from public duty, some opportunities to es- 
cape from artificial to natural hfe, were both a ne- 
cessity and a delight. And as the hero of the 
classical mythology, after his combats with savage 
beasts and men, was wont to retire at intervals 
from his labors, and to bury himself deep in some 
Caucasian sohtude, that he might purge himself 
from the soil of earthly contact, and regam the 
consciousness of his divine original ; even so did 
our great Statesman break away, as often as he 
could, from the din and smoke, the dust and tur- 
moil of public life, and betake himself to his farm, 
and even thence plunge into the deeper solitude of 
the silent forest and the resounding shore, that he 
might restore his broken fellowship with himself, 
and recover the consciousness of his higher nature. 
These moments were indeed few and far between ; 
and few are the revelations made to us of the mus- 
ings of these sohtary hours ! But they go far to 
mark the man. They invest his character with a 
certain poetical interest ; they take him at once 
out of the vulgar ranks ; they distinguish him for- 
ever from our burly heroes of the stump and the 
platform ; and show him to have possessed a higher 



25 

and finer nature, wMch might act upon, but could 
not mix with the coarser mould. They place him 
by the side of such men as Burke, who while they 
move in the common world, and act with common 
men, and with all the coarse machinery employed 
by them, have yet a world of their own apart from 
this, and far more congenial to them ; — men who 
in some sort live above the world while they live 
in it, and keep their souls in some relationship 
with a divmer sphere. — For myself, I must acknow- 
ledge that I am deeply impressed with this side of 
Mr. Webster's many-sided character, and regard 
him as almost equally admirable in this his contem- 
plative repose, as in his proudest field of action. 

In passing on from these tastes of Mr. "Webster 
to a higher order of affections, it will perhaps be 
thought, that he had less of that broad philan- 
thropy which embraces the whole world of man- 
kind, than is required by the highest law of Chris- 
tian charity. He took little part in the great phi- 
lanthropic movements of the age, and showed little 
S3rmpathy with them. But it may be said on the 
other hand, by way of compensation, that what his 
affections wanted in expausiveness, they made up 
in intensity in the narrower sphere in which they 
moved. If he loved the world less, he loved his 



26 

kindred and country more. If lie had less of that 
fashionable and sentimental benevolence, which 
travels far out of its way to find objects upon 
which to expend its sympathies, he had more of 
that genuine, old fashioned humanity, which pro- 
vides for one's own household, and relieves the suf- 
ferer at one's door. If he was no cosmopolitan, he 
was in a very remarkable degree susceptible of all 
the attachments of locality, the ties of consan- 
guinity, and the sentiments of nationahty. Where 
indeed shall we look to find a man in whom all the 
domestic, the social, the patriotic afiections were 
more healthful and abundant! 

With what yearning love did he cHng, till his 
very last days, to the home of his birth and the hum- 
ble scenes of his childhood 1 and how eagerly did 
he bend his steps thitherward, each returning year, 
that he might revisit once more the old elm which 
his father had planted, the old well which he had 
dug, the old cellar, half filled with rubbish, where 
the log cabin had stood which he had built in the 
wilderness! And with what mingled feelings of 
fondness and pride did he regard his noble father, 
weeping at the thought of the sacrifices made by 
him in giving him an education, and then striving 
to repay the debt of gratitude, by sustaimng him 



27 

through all the infirmities of his declining years! 
And how sincerely did he mourn for him, and 
piously and reverently cherish his memory after he 
was gone ! And when this doom of nature was 
reversed, and his own children were taken from 
him, with what affecting tenderness did he pour 
forth a father's sorrows over their tomb ! — As for the 
old Salisbury neighbors, for miles around, he never 
forgot them ! and after more than half a century 
he writes about them by name to one of his old 
school-masters, and tells him whether they are still 
living at the old place ! And as to his new neigh- 
bors at Marshfield, on what friendly and familiar 
terms did he live with them ! and when he was 
about to die, with what good taste and good feeling 
did he select his pall-bearers from among them, 
rather than from the ranks of worldly pride and 
greatness ! 

In the circle of private friendship, if we may 
judge from the testimony of those who knew him 
best, all the finer traits of his character were seen 
to the best advantage. He gave his hand warmly 
to his friends and drew them to him with a strong 
attraction. When surrounded by them, in the free- 
dom of the social hour, he brought forth from the 
good treasure of his heart, such riches of thought 



28 

and feeling, as the great world knew notliing of. 
Here his brow lost its rigors and its terrors, here 
was seen the fascination of his smile, here he laid 
by his senatorial dignity, and assuming a presence 
which was more winning, and giving free play to 
his pent-up humor, and drawmg upon his great 
fund of anecdote, indulged in those lighter graces 
of conversation, which were all the more captiva- 
ting in him from their contrast with the severer and 
more elaborate style of his pubhc discourse. But 
httle of this fire-side eloquence of Mr. Webster has 
yet been published ; from this little, however, we 
should infer, that it is as well worth being fully 
reported, as the table-talk of Martin Luther or of 
Dr. Johnson, with both of whom he has sometimes 
been compared, both in the more rugged, and the 
more genial aspects of his nature. 

But stronger than his love of kindred or friends, 
was his love of country. He was not indeed indif- 
ferent to the welfare of other nations. He spoke 
potent words for Greece and for Hungary. But 
these words appear to have been dictated by some 
apprehension of a possible danger to American in- 
stitutions from the triumph of absolute principles 
in Europe, and by some sense of the rightness and 
fitness on our part, as the leading RepubHc of the 



29 

world, of letting our voice be heard in favor of 
freedom ; and not at all by any modern notions of 
the political fraternity and solidarity of the human 
species. His words, even in these instances, savor 
more of American patriotism, than of foreign pro- 
pagandism. Spartam nactiis es, hanc exorna, was the 
ruling principle of his life, and the master-passion 
of his soul. And since he firmly believed that the 
safety, honor and welfare of the whole American 
people could be maintamed only by means of the 
Federal Constitution and the Union of the States, 
it was upon these that the energies of his patrio- 
tism were concentrated. With sleepless vigilance 
he saw from far whatever threatened them with 
evil. And in the hour of danger he stood fore- 
most, and often single-handed, in the unminent 
deadly breach, striking right hand and left, accord- 
ing to the quarter from which the danger came ; 
rebutting Southern sophistries, and rebukmg North- 
ern prejudices, as the case might be ; and at last, 
when nothing else would do, devoting himself for his 
country, after the sublimest examples of ancient 
patriotism. 

But I cannot brmg to a close what ought in 
justice to be said of Mr. Webster's personal charac- 
ter, without adverting to his rehgious feehngs and 



30 

convictions. No man ever had more of what may 
be called the natural sentiment of religion, — the 
reverent sense of our dependence on a superior 
Power. From his earhest youth, and through all 
his College days, as well as in after years, he never 
thought or spoke of things sacred and divine with- 
out deep seriousness, and never attended upon any 
rehgious exercise without becoming devoutness and 
solemnity : and this too at a period when the spirit 
of profane mockery was more rife in our Colleges 
and hterary circles, than at any time before or 
since. 

With many persons at the present day, this 
natural and instinctive reverence of mind, is the 
beginning and end of religion. But it was not so 
with Mr. Webster. He was no pantheist or trans- 
cendentalist. He believed in the outward, objec- 
tive reality of those divine things to which this in- 
ward sentiment relates. He believed in a personal 
God, possessed of moral, as well as natural perfec- 
tion, and exercising a moral and providential gov- 
ernment over the world. He believed in the Bible 
as a Kevelation, and in Jesus Christ as a Saviour. 
He believed in the Church, in the Mmistry, in the 
Ordinances of the Gospel, as positive institutions 
established by God for his own worship and the 
redemption of the race. 



31 

These religious convictions, received by tradi- 
tion from his Puritan ancestors, and early incorpo- 
rated by catechism and sermon, by psalm and 
hymn, into the very frame-work of his mind, were 
fortified by his later reflections and studies, and 
appear to have been never seriously disturbed 
by infidel doubts or objections. Nor were these 
convictions coldly speculative; — they were deep 
and heartfelt. And there is much reason to 
think, that as he advanced in years, they exerted a 
more and more controlling influence over his life. 
As the earthly shadows of Pleasure and of Power 
by which he had been tempted, began to recede, 
the Eternal Realities in which he had trusted, drew 
near and took strong hold upon him. And ever 
and anon, as he stood on the shore and looked out 
on the illimitable ocean, or lifted up his eyes to 
the starry heavens, the visions of immortality broke 
in upon his soul with overpowering clearness. 

As his life drew near its close, the germs of 
religious character which had been early implan- 
ted, and never destroyed, sprang up to high ma- 
turity. By that law which so often opposes the 
spiritual to the natural, as his outer man perished, 
the inner man was renewed day by day. As 
the lamp of Hfe was going out, the Hght of Faith 



32 

burned brighter and brighter, and filled with its 
radiance the house of mourning and of death. It 
was the faith of the Christian, and not the philoso- 
phy of the Sage, which gave him the deep serenity 
of his last hours, and that great victory over his 
last enemy. It is not too much to say, that his 
rehgious character assumed at last a grandeur pro- 
portioned to the scale of his other attributes, and 
that all which had been before wanting to the high- 
est style of manhood, was supplied in this crown of 
Christian perfection which was given to him just 
before his departure. 

The great intellectual powers, the great and 
various learning, the noble qualities of heart, which 
have now been ascribed to Mr. Webster, had their 
highest embodiment and expression in his character 
as an Orator. In no other character could all this 
double wealth of mind and heart have been ade- 
quately exliibited. Nor could this noble character 
have been sustained by him, in its highest dignity, 
had he been less richly gifted either on the intel- 
lectual or emotional side of his nature. But since 
he had at command these essential qualifications, 
and could draw at will from exhaustless treasures of 
thought and learning, and from still more exhaust- 



33 

less fountains of feeling and imagination^ and 
possessed besides the physical advantages of voice 
and person in high perfection, he only needed a 
great occasion to make him a great orator. Such 
an occasion never failed to present itself in due 
season, and whenever it confronted him, it always 
found him ready to cope with it. However great 
and appalling the occasion might be, it was always 
well met in the man, and he greeted it with joy. 
He not only rose with the occasion, but rose supe- 
rior to it. In his greatest efforts he seemed to be 
conscious of possessing a reserved power, be^^ond 
the exigencies of the moment. There was some- 
thing of calm self-possession and high composure in 
his air, like that of Apollo, when he had sped but 
a single shaft from his full quiver ; — something of 
proud exultation, in which however there was 
nothing of arrogance, which seemed to say, ' that 
half his strength he put not forth!' 

At such times, when standing face to face with 
some of those great occasions which have been 
signalized by his triumphs, Mr. Webster was seen 
in his glory, and reached perhaps the culminating 
point beyond which our present rational and physi- 
cal powers cannot go. His temperament, com- 
monly inert and impassive, was then wholly vital- 
5 



34 

ized, his very frame was dilated, and his swarthy 
countenance illuminated, by the inspiring impulse 
of the emergency. In the high-drawn sketch of 
one of these occasions given by Mr. March, he is 
described as having been " gazed at as something 
more than mortal, and having appeared as Moses 
might, when emerging from the smoke of Sinai, 
his face all radiant with the breath of divinity." 
Another witness of the best authority has affirmed, 
with somewhat cooler judgment, " that after hav- 
ing heard some of the ablest speeches of the great- 
est living orators on both sides the water, he had 
never heard anything which so completely realized 
his conception of what Demosthenes was when he 
delivered the Oration for the Crown." 

In his character as an orator, he occupied the 
three great fields of eloquence, the popular, the 
forensic, and the parliamentary. And if the ques- 
tions were asked, by whom, in our own age and 
country, the appropriate excellence of each of 
these kinds has been in the highest degree illus- 
trated, it could not be better answered, than by 
pointing for the first, to Mr. Webster's addresses at 
Plymouth and Bunker Hill ; for the second, to his 
pleas in the case of the Knapps, and of Dartmouth 
College J for the third, to his repHes to Hayne and 



35 

Calhoun in the debates in the Senate on Nullifi- 
cation. 

In some particular excellences of oratory, it 
may readily be allowed that he was surpassed by 
some others ; — in overpowering vehemence perhaps 
by Demosthenes, in ornate and copious diction by 
Cicero, in the exuberant gush of moral sentiment 
and enthusiasm by Burke, in sparkling wit and 
felicitous point by Sheridan, in subtle dialectics by 
Calhoun, in the graces of elocution and power to 
move the passions by Henry Clay : but in the 
harmonious combination of opposite excellences, in 
the blending of reason and of passion, of argument 
and illustration, of learning and imagination, of 
logic and rhetoric, of strength and beauty ; in the 
whole impression thus produced ; in that central 
power of commanding attention and securing con- 
viction and persuasion ; he was rarely equalled and 
perhaps never surpassed. 

But while the eloquence of Mr. Webster com- 
bined in a remarkable manner these oj^posite excel- 
lences, it was after all, as it seems to me, most 
distinguished for its intellectual element. His elo- 
quence more than that of any other orator, was 
the eloquence of thought and of reason. And of 
this distinguishing trait, the best example, if I do 



36 

not mistake, is his reply to Mr. Calhoun, already 
referred to. Unlike his rejoly to Mr. Hayne, it de- 
pended wholly for its effect upon clearness of 
thought and power of argument. It exhibited, as 
has been well said, the dignity of human reason in 
its loftiest exj)ression. In the course of a long de- 
bate, in which almost every senator had taken 
part, no real progress had been made, no solid 
ground had been gained. The whole subject had 
come to ajDpear like that Serbonian bog described 
by Mr. Webster, in which one after another, on 
which side soever he might approach, went down, 
and sank deeper and deeper, the more he endeav- 
ored to extricate himself When Mr. Webster 
arose, after a brief exordium, he laid down, in sim- 
ple and concise terms, four propositions, in oppo- 
sition to the three which had been advanced by 
Mr. Calhoun. Henceforward there was something 
to stand upon. The entrance of his word had 
given light. As he proceeded, the mists cleared 
away, the darkness fled, the chaos became organ- 
ized. And when he had finished, the whole subject 
was emphatically elucidated, and the whole contro- 
versy finally settled. 

It has been said of Lord Chatham, that he was 
not the master, but the slave of his own speech, 



37 

and that he was carried along by it, he knew not 
whither. The contrary of this was always true of 
Mr. Webster; but never more true than in this 
reply to Mr. Calhoun. That high mastery over the 
subject, that fund of reserved power, with which 
he always impressed his hearers, was strikingly ex- 
hibited during the delivery of this speech, by a 
little incident which I happened to witness, from 
standing in the crowd near the orator. At a mo- 
ment when the argument seemed to demand his 
undivided attention, and when the powers of the 
assembly were most severely taxed in following 
him, and all were hanging on his lips, a package of 
letters was laid on his desk by a page of the Sen- 
ate. Without at all arresting the course of his 
argumentation, except perhaps by a slight abate- 
ment of the fluency of his utterance, he opened 
his letters, and cast his eye over them, so as appa- 
rently to possess himself of their chief contents, 
by a perfectly contemporaneous process of thought; 
and thus gave demonstration that, great as were 
the occasion and the subject, he had mind enough 
for them, and to spare. 

The immediate effect of Mr. Webster's oratory 
will never be forgotten by any by whom it has 
ever been experienced or witnessed. Even when 



38 

most purely argumentative it held the hearer spell- 
bound. When it rose to a higher and more impas- 
sioned strain, it swept over the audience lilte a 
rushing wind. And at the close of his great efforts, 
it was not at all unusual for him to leave his hear- 
ers in that state of su^Dernatural stillness and breath- 
less enchantment, which was once produced by Mr. 
Sheridan, and once by Lord Brougham, and here 
and there, in the course of centuries, by some other 
great orator, and which, whenever it occurs, is al- 
ways regarded as the highest triumph of eloquence. 

From contemplating Mr. Webster as an orator 
we are naturally led to survey the vast field of his 
puhlic services, as it was more in this character than 
in any other, that he accomplished whatever was 
done by him for the good of his country. 

And first of all, it was no small advantage to the 
country to be represented, at home and abroad, by 
an organ so admirably endowed and accomplished. 
Born as he was under the American flag, s^Dringing 
from the very heart of American life, formed in- 
tellectually and morally by American influences, 
and embodying American ideas, he showed to the 
world what these were capable of j^roducing. By 
his own greatness he reflected honor on the system 



39 

which he represented, and rendered ilKistrious the 
age and country which had given him birth. He 
redeemed his native soil from the reproach of hav- 
ing been smitten with intellectual sterility, in being 
dissevered from the seats of European civilization, 
and furnished to every countryman of his who 
went abroad, a passport to favor which he was al- 
ways proud to present, and which was never chal- 
lenged. 

But this was not all. While he honored the 
American character by his manner of conceiving 
and representing it on the stage of the world, he at 
the same time did much for its improvement and 
elevation. It is a remark of general truth, that 
the education of a people proceeds from its great 
men. And this remark was never more true than 
in this instance. The American people owe to the 
lessons of Daniel Webster the best part of the in- 
struction they have received in the principles of 
their Constitution, and their rights and duties un- 
der it. They owe to his love of the Union and 
his sense of its value, inculcated upon them so fer- 
vently and so incessantly, whether they would hear 
or forbear, very much of the strength of that feel- 
ing of nationality, which holds together so firmly 
those who are repelled from each other by so many 



40 

discordant interests. In several well-known in- 
stances the whole previous sentiment of the coun- 
try on great national questions, has been revolu- 
tionized by him at a single blow. And the habitual 
mode of thinking and feeling of the great mass of 
the people on all matters involving the general 
welfare, — the great public opinion of the country, 
— has been in j)ast times formed and fashioned, and 
is at present controlled and guided, by his influence, 
in a far greater degree than by any other agency. 
Mr. Webster was not a writer, in the strict sense 
of this term. He never addressed the public imme- 
diately as an aidJior. He never wrote a hook in his 
life. But probably no author ever held for so long 
a time so intimate a relation with the public, or ex- 
ercised so transforming a power over it. His 
speeches, as they fell from his lips, were caught up 
by the press, and transferred to the page, and be- 
came the popular literature of the hour, and were 
read in every counting-room, in every work-shop, 
in every dwelling-house, throughout the land, and 
were then formed into a permanent library of po- 
litical wisdom and patriotic sentiment. And we 
have only to consider what these speeches were, 
which have furnished for so many years a principal 
part of the reading and study of the people ; — how 



41 

pure in style, how profound in thought, how vari- 
ous in their topics, how frank and honest, manly 
and independent, noble and elevated in their tone, 
how free from the corrupting flatteries and mis- 
leading sophistries of the demagogue, how full of 
the love of liberty and progress on the one hand, 
and on the other, how fraught with veneration for 
law, and imbued with the spirit of a wise conserva- 
tism ; — we have only to consider this, in order to 
form some estimate of the good influence which he 
has exerted, and to see how ill we could afford to 
lose that part of our national education which we 
have received from him. 

But it is impossible to give any just account of 
the good which has been done by Mr. Webster, 
without descending somewhat more into particulars. 
Let it be considered, then, that there is not one of 
the great fundamental interests of society, which 
has not received from him, at some time or other, 
some specific, signal, and vital service, by which it 
has been laid under greater obligations to him than 
to any other man. 

Where is the man to whom the cause of learning 
owes so much as to Daniel Webster ! By his cele- 
brated argument before the Supreme Court in the 
case of Dartmouth College, the law was settled 

6 



42 

which secures to Learning the indejienclence of her 
institutions, and the free enjoyment of their char- 
tered jirivileges. It was owing to this argument, 
and to the remarkable abihty and ^^athetic earnest- 
ness with which it was enforced, beyond all ques- 
tion, that the law was so settled. Henceforward 
our Colleges and Universities, holding their proper- 
ty by the same firm legal tenure as individuals, 
may justly look to him almost as a second founder. 
"The battle fought, and the victory won, in that 
particular case," says Mr. Everett, " were fought 
and gained for every College and University, for 
every Academy and School in the United States, 
endowed with property, or possessed of chartered 
rights." 

Of the same paramount nature is the service 
rendered by Mr. Webster to the cause of religion, 
in his argument on the validity of Girard's will, 
and in his constant, emphatic public testimony to 
the importance of Christianity, in accordance with 
the opinions there expressed. It is something to 
say of a public man, in an age like this, as has been 
said of him, that no word of profaneness or irrever- 
ence ever fell from his lips. But it is not enough 
to say for Mr. Webster. Always and everywhere, 
alike in pubHc and in private, he uttered himself 



43 

in a full, direct, open and bold vindication of the 
truth of the Christian rehgion, and its importance 
to the success of our free institutions, representing 
it as the grand condition on which depends the 
realization of the hopes of the American patriot. 
All that he has said on this subject, if collected to- 
gether, would make a large volume. And I can 
think of no one thing which, at the present mo- 
ment, is exerting an influence so favorable to reli- 
gion on the great public mind of this country, as 
this earnest testimony of Mr. Webster in its behalf, 
repeated as it has been in every possible form, and 
now rehearsed from every pulpit, and spread broad- 
cast in the newspapers over the whole length and 
breadth of the land. Not many wise, mot many 
mighty are called. But when one of the very 
wisest and the very mightiest is called, and pro- 
foundly feels and openly acknowledges the trans- 
cendent claims of religion, it is an argument not 
easily disposed of by a scoffing and conceited infi- 
dehty. When such a man as Daniel Webster lays 
his hand on the Bible, and says. This is the BooJc, it 
is worth more than whole volumes of Evidences. 
Another of our great vital interests is that of 
law. And there is no lawyer who will not join 
with Mr. Chflford of Massachusetts, in saying, that 



44 

it is scarcely possible to measure the magnitude of 
the debt which the law owes to Mr. Webster. To 
say nothing of the fact that he stood foremost in 
the ordinary i^ractice of the law, and illustrated by 
his genius all its ordinary branches, he entered on 
a field of Jurisprudence such as has existed no 
where else, in any age of the world ; and was the 
founder of a school or system of law, determining 
the new and delicate relations of the Federal Gov- 
ernment to particular States and to individuals; and 
has thus provided for the peaceable settlement, by 
regular judicial process, of those countless questions 
of conflicting claims and jurisdictions, which must 
otherwise have awaited, here as elsewhere in the 
world, the dreadful arbitrament of the sword. 

But eminent as were the services rendered by 
Mr. Webster to the great interests of learning, 
religion and law, they are not still the services 
upon which his claims to the gratitude of his coun- 
trymen principally repose. The services already 
enumerated were for the most part performed by 
him in his earher and professional career, and 
though brilliant enough to eclipse any ordinary 
fame, are themselves completely thrown into the 
shade by the services rendered by him in his later 
and higher career as a diplomatist and statesman. 



45 

On liis accession to the office of Secretary of 
State in 1841, he found the country on the verge 
of war with the most powerful nation of the world. 
The old questions of fifty years standing respecting 
the North-eastern boundary seemed fast ripening 
to bloody issues, and at the same time new sources 
of irritation were occurring on the high seas and 
along the Canadian frontier. These difficulties, 
old and new, were brought to a satisfactory settle- 
ment in the Treaty of Washington. And the 
credit of this great treaty, by which the honor and 
interest of the country were asserted, and at the 
same time the peace of the w^orld maintained, is 
due mainly to the negotiator on the American side. 
It was doubtless owing to the confidence inspired 
by his character, that Great Britain was disposed, 
after so many failures, to enter upon a new nego- 
tiation. And the delicate trust of conducting it 
was committed by the English Government to one 
known as a personal friend of Mr. Webster, and 
was undertaken by him solely and professedly on 
the ground of his "reliance upon the honorable 
and upright character of the American Secretary." 
How amply this confidence was justified by Mr. 
Webster ; how nobly he rose above the low cun- 
ning and chicanery of a hacknied diplomacy ; with 



46 

what high statesmanship he provided against possi- 
ble contingencies, and throngh difficulties which 
had baffled all previous attempts at settlement, 
secured a result advantageous to all the parties 
concerned ; all this is sufficiently kno^vn to the 
country and to the world. It is well remarked by 
the editor of Mr. Webster's diplomatic papers, that 
the just measure of praise due to the American 
negotiator may be estimated by reflecting, what 
would have been our condition, if instead of a war 
with Mexico, we had been involved in a war with 
Great Britain. 

But besides these services of Mr. Webster in 
adjusting our foreign relations, and far superior to 
them in dignity and importance, are his services in 
defending the Government at home. During the 
eventful period of his public life, several successive 
crises have arisen in which the Constitution and 
the Union have been seriously threatened from 
different and opposite quarters. — The prevalence at 
the South, some twenty years ago, of a violent 
hostility to the Protective Policy dictated by North- 
ern interests, gave birth to the extreme doctrines 
of State rights and Nullification. With Hayne and 
Calhoun for their champions, it seemed for a mo- 
ment as if they were about to overrun the country 



47 

and override the Government. They advanced 
under color of a specious theory, by which the 
Constitution is represented as a compact between 
sovereign States, liable to be dissolved at their op- 
tion. By this theory the good work accomplished 
by the framers of the Constitution was wholly un- 
done, and the flood-gates were opened for all the 
evils of the old Confederacy, in a ten-fold aggra- 
vated form. Had this theory been established, it is 
difficult even for the imagination to dej)ict the 
miseries Avhich must inevitably have ensued. That 
it was not established, and all its train of fatal con- 
sequences with it, is owing, under God, to the stand 
then taken by Mr. Webster. No other man was 
equal to the emergency. But no sooner did it 
arise, than he was ready for it, armed and equipped 
at all points, as if his whole life had been spent in 
preparing for it. In two successive encounters, in 
fair and open field, with the odds against him, he 
met the two great champions of Nullification, and 
gave them and their doctrine a hopeless overthrow. 
In looking back to the ever memorable contests of 
that period, we are apt, in our admiration of the 
prowess of the field, to forget the momentous inter- 
ests at stake. We are apt to think more of that 
eloquence which shook the Capitol, and entranced 



48 

the nation, than of that profound research which 
laid bare, for the first time, the deep foundations of 
our Government in the will of the whole people. 
But after all, Mr. Webster is likely to be remem- 
bered and estimated by his grateful countrymen in 
after times, far less as an orator, than as the Ex- 
pounder and Defender of the Constitution, and the 
chosen instrument, in the hand of Providence, in 
effecting the deliverance of the country from the 
evils with which it was threatened. 

At a later period, and nearer to our own times, 
the prevalence at the North of hostility to Southern 
institutions, gave birth to projects by which the 
Union and the Constitution were again endangered ; 
— the Union, by fostering a spirit of desperate sec- 
tional animosity ; — the Constitution, by trampling 
on the guarantees established by it for the protec- 
tion of the rights of the slave-holding States. 
Through the excitement consequent upon these 
projects, the public business was brought to a stand, 
and the public mind dismayed with the apprehen- 
sion of coming evils. In this crisis the veteran 
Senator from Massachusetts was seen again at his 
post, looking somewhat older, but showing no 
abatement either in the power of his mind, or the 
fire of his patriotism. He stood where he always 



49 

had stood, and where he had promised he should al- 
ways be found, for the Constitution and the Union. 
The assailants came from the opposite point of the 
compass, and so he had fxced about; but he had not 
changed sides. It was no longer the gay and 
prancing chivalry of the South which he had to 
encounter ; but a sturdy and multitudinous North- 
ern constituency, and foremost among them his old 
friends from Massachusetts, with whom and for 
whom he had stood so long, now advancing under 
new leaders, and impelled to constantly new en- 
croachments by the aggressive force of moral and 
religious convictions. The impending contest im- 
posed upon him the severest trial of his life. It 
required his parting with old friends, for whom he 
cherished profound esteem, and whose animating 
convictions on the great question at issue were 
deeply shared by him, in everything but in their 
threatening aspect to the Union and the Constitu- 
tion. But so long as he beheved these to be in 
danger, it concerned him little who were friends or 
foes. In the similar crisis just referred to, he had 
united in the defence of the Constitution with an 
administration, to the general policy of which he 
was strongly opposed, and against which he had al- 
ways acted ; and he was prepared now, in a case 

7 



50 

equally involving the stability of the Government, 
to separate from those, whose general policy he ap- 
proved and had always supported. He foresaw 
the storm he was raising ; but it did not move him 
from his purpose. He was willing now, as before, 
to take his chance among those upon whom blows 
might fall first and fall thickest. And accordingly 
on the 7th of March his voice was again heard, in 
tones as earnest as ever came from his lips, speaking 
not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, 
but as an American, and as a member of the Senate 
of the United States. «He felt," he said, " that he 
had a duty to perform, a part to act, not for his own 
security, for he was looking out for no fragment 
upon which to float away from the wreck, if wreck 
there must be ; but for the good of the whole, for 
the preservation of the Union." It has turned out 
here, as before, that the post of danger, assumed 
voluntarily in the spirit of self-sacrifice, became the 
post of honor. By a singular felicity of fortune, 
Mr. Webster became, the second time, the principal 
instrument of a deliverance as signal as any which 
has occurred in the history of the nation. By 
common consent he is entitled to the principal 
credit of this great settlement, in which the North 
and the South have once more embraced each other 



51 

with fraternal affection, and under which the coun- 
try has resiuned its wonted career of peace and 
prosperity. 

With the departure of this great Statesman, the 
second great epoch of American history is brought 
to a close. In the first period, the Constitution 
was established by the wisdom of the fathers of the 
Kepublic. It devolved on the second period to 
guard the new institute amid the shocks and con- 
vulsions of the political world attendant on its 
establishment, to develop its latent principles, to 
define and limit its powers, to adjust the relations 
of its several parts, to supply unforeseen deficiencies 
and provide for future contingencies, to cause it to 
be obeyed and loved at home, and known and re- 
spected abroad, and above all to deliver it down 
unimpaired to after times. And this was precisely 
the work for which Mr. Webster appears to have 
been raised up by Providence, and for which he 
was exactly fitted. It has been laid to his charge, 
that he himself founded no great organizations to 
bind him to the future. He found already estab- 
lished all the great organizations of society ; and 
he saw no occasion either to add others to them, or 



52 

to set them aside, to make place for those of his 
own contrivance. From the whole class of political 
schemers and radical reformers, he was separated by 
the force of a temperament fundamentally conser- 
vative. He received the institutions delivered 
down by our fathers as a sacred trust, to be im- 
proved perhaps where they might be imperfect, 
or to be modified with a wise and reverent cau- 
tion, as new circumstances might arise, but at all 
hazards to be maintained, in their substance and 
spirit, for the good of our own and coming genera- 
tions. This office, civitatem jam conditam conservare, 
was the only one to which he felt himself to be 
called. If it was an office second in dignity to that 
of the founders, it was still an office arduous enough 
to task all his powers, and glorious enough to fill 
his highest ambition. To this office, according to 
the elevated conception which he had formed of its 
duties, he devoted himself, in the fear of God, 
through a long Hfe, up to the last hour of it. And 
nobly was it discharged! That which was com- 
mitted to him, in trust for posterity, he had kept. 
When his eyes were turned for the last time to be- 
hold the sun in the heavens, he saw, as he had 
prayed he might, " the gorgeous ensign of the Re- 



53 

public still full high advanced, not a stripe erased, 
not a star obscured." His mission of preserving, 
through this long and doubtful period of experi- 
ment, a Constitution of Government affecting the 
present happiness of millions, and the future desti- 
nies of the whole human family, was now ended. — 
Well done, good and faithful servant, is the verdict of 
his country, and we cannot doubt of that higher 
tribunal before which he has gone to appear. 

In that third period which is now dawning 
upon us with doubtful portents, our safety lies in 
maintaining the Constitution, as established by its 
framers in the first period, and as deUvered down 
to us, through the second, with the expositions of 
its great defender. Happy will it be for us, if on 
the withdrawal of his wise and conservative care, 
the great wheel of political movement, (to use one 
of his own figures,) hitherto so guarded and regular 
in its rotation, shall not be at once unduly accele- 
rated, and take fire, like the chariotrwheels in the 
races of antiquity, with the rapidity of its own 
motion ! Happy will it be for us, if the great prin- 
ciples inculcated by Mr. Webster during his whole 
life, shall be remembered by us now that he has 
gone ; and the counsels and admonitions which he 



54 

has so recently addressed to us, shall be faithfully 
heeded ! 

It will l3e in vain that we shall seek to immor- 
talize his features and his form in marble and in 
bronze, if we forget his doctrines and his precepts. 
It will be in vain that we shall erect his monument, 
and garnish his sepulchre, if we disclaim his maxims 
and decline from his principles. Fruitless to him 
are all these tardy honors decreed to him by a Re- 
public, now indeed grateful and repentant, but too 
late. The highest splendors of earthty station, 
eclipsed in his view by a glory which excels them 
all, can no longer jDrovoke a sigh or a regret. But 
if earth's unsubstantial splendors have ceased to at- 
tract his regard, not so the great cause of human 
progress and happiness, not so the great institu- 
tions of Law and Religion, by which alone that pro- 
gress and happiness can be secured. Seated on 
that mythic cloud, by which he has already been 
snatched from the earth, and borne aloft to the 
sphere of the immortals, methinks he may still be 
seen watching, with guardian care, over these great 
institutions to which his life was devoted, still 
frowning as aforetime, with the blackness of mid- 
night, upon every project threatening them with 



55 



evil, still smiling as aforetime, with the beauty of 
morning, upon every design promising them advan- 
tage, and aiding every honest effort in their behalf 
with his prayer and benediction. 



\ 



W 73 H 



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EULOGY 



ON 



DANIEL WEBSTEE. 



BY LEONARD WOODS, JR., D. D 



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